Janelle Monáe: Artist in Residence

Her new roles—on Amazon’s Homecoming and in the summer horror movie Antebellum—are perfect for our unsettled moment. The eight-time Grammy nominee, style icon, and Prince protégé speaks from quarantine about fear, fury, and her hope for “a real uprising.”

I have just asked where she is geographically. I had to, because she’s using a digital background that sets her floating above the Golden Gate Bridge, hovering near the slope of one of its spindly tentacles, surrounded by water on all sides. But Monáe takes my question and knocks it on its side. It’s not about where she is—it’s about where she’s decided to take me.

It’s a mid-April day. Monáe and I are, of course, talking to each other over Zoom, the video-chat platform that became indispensable when the coronavirus began its rampage. On top of being an eight-time Grammy nominee who can sing, rap, dance, and play piano and guitar—as well as act—with tremendous ease, Monáe is built for an era in which technology facilitates humanity. She is a disciple of the classic 1927 sci-fi movie Metropolis. She spent years crafting concept albums about apocalyptic robots and black, queer, Afro-futuristic revolution, often performing as her android alter ego, Cindi Mayweather. Alongside frequent collaborators Chuck Lightning and Nate Wonder, she’s also the cofounder of an arts collective called the Wondaland Arts Society, whose manifesto includes lofty lines about how songs are like spaceships, books are like stars, and music is a weapon of the future.

Hat and Ralph Lauren shirt, her own.Photographs by Collier Schorr.

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Monáe’s nascent acting career—she debuted in 2016 with side-by-side turns in the movies Moonlight and Hidden Figures—tilts toward conspiracy and dystopia these days. She’s just taken over the lead of Homecoming, the Amazon Prime thriller, now in its second unnerving season, which dives deeper into the mystery of the secret facility conducting dark experiments on war vets. She will also star in Antebellum, a bloodcurdling, time-twisting horror film about slavery that’s due in theaters August 21. The rest of us are still unpacking what it means to live in a state of unreality. Janelle Monáe has been expecting it.

So at the time of our conversation, Monáe is…somewhere. She’s in a room, definitely, her arms outstretched in front of her on a table. Her skin is glowing, despite the fact that she’s still recovering from a bout of mercury poisoning diagnosed last year. Monáe is one of those rare people with perfectly symmetrical features, a possessor of almost algorithmic beauty. She is wearing a white jumpsuit from a Japanese brand she can’t remember, topped with a quilted white Ruslan Baginskiy baker-boy cap and a bandanna from an Atlanta thrift store tied around her neck. She stands up to show me the full look, so petite that she is never in any danger of escaping the frame.

“She has so much vibrance and she’s no bigger than a minute,” says Julia Roberts, who starred in the first season of Homecoming and who, as an executive producer, personally approved Monáe’s casting. “When I walk up to her, I feel like I’ve just come out of the giant-women forest.”

Monáe doesn’t want to share where she is partly because the place you’re sheltering becomes exponentially more important when you’re going to be there indefinitely. Besides, this gives her a chance to raise her reputation as a deeply private person to the level of performance art. When I ask her to describe the things around her, she pauses and looks around for a moment. What comes next sounds like disassembled Björk lyrics.

“I have an orange,” she starts, after careful, Cheshire cat-like consideration. “I have a pineapple. I have a notebook! And I have a hammer.”

Artful obfuscation is part of Monáe’s appeal. She is, after all, a performer who counted Prince among her mentors. Monáe, who’s 34, has protected her mystique from the beginning of her career, even when she was an unknown singing on the steps of Atlanta college libraries for free, before Diddy signed her to a remarkably hands-off deal with Bad Boy Records in 2008 and jump-started her mainstream career. Monáe’s place in our culture is singular. She’s a hybrid soul-pop-R&B singer with a signature black-and-white wardrobe, fusing a fondness for old-school pompadours and funky James Brown dance moves with Octavia Butler-style sci-fi narratives and futuristic terrains. As she proclaimed when she opened the Oscars this year with a splashy musical number, she’s also black and queer. In another era, she might not have been able to exist in the public sphere at all.

“Janelle has so much vibrance,” says Julia Roberts. “This kind of show is not for the faint of heart and the workload is Herculean. I know that firsthand.”

“No one stands in the fullness of their power quite like Janelle Monáe,” says her friend former First Lady Michelle Obama. “As an artist, she is constantly evolving…. No matter what Janelle does—whether it’s making music, acting, or producing—she approaches it all with grace, kindness, and an untouchable sense of style. She is an incandescent talent.”

Monáe, a warm Midwesterner at heart, was raised in Kansas City, Kansas, by Baptist working-class parents. Her mother, Janet, was a janitor and hotel maid; her father, Michael, a truck driver. Monáe is quick to ask me about my own family and self-isolation, sneaking multiple questions under the trench coat of a single burst: “How are you? How is your family? How are you guys coping? Are you by yourself or surrounded by people?” At one point, she happily takes off her cap to reveal fuzzy cornrows, done by hairstylist Nikki Nelms before the pandemic. “Look at my hair!” she chirps. “I’ve had the same braids for the last month and a half.”

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ALL DRESSED UP
Janelle Monáe and (inset) Collier Schorr, who shot her from thousands of miles away. Coat by Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello.Photographs by Collier Schorr.

For the record, here are the activities that have occupied Monáe’s quarantine itinerary: waking up at 5:30 a.m. to catch the sunrise; working on new music; hanging out with her self-isolation housemates, who have dubbed themselves the “Quaranteenagers”; honing her DJ’ing skills with mixes heavy on Stevie Wonder and Earth, Wind & Fire; playing trivia games on Houseparty on her phone; and downloading Duolingo to learn French from scratch. Monáe’s production company, Wondaland Pictures, signed a first-look deal with Universal in 2018 and, she explains, “I’m looking at a couple projects that deal with learning French.” She is also, like millions of others, spending her days seething about Washington’s response to the virus. “The way our government is handling things—especially this administration—is evil,” she says. (In this interview and many others, Monáe refuses to say the words Donald Trump.) “We can’t trust this administration to tell us the truth, to protect us. It’s always going to be power first. It’s always going to be capitalism first.”

Politically, Monáe’s beliefs fall right in line with the ethos of Homecoming, which was created by Micah Bloomberg and Eli Horowitz, who adapted their Gimlet Media podcast of the same name. In its first season, directed by Mr. Robot’s Sam Esmail, Homecoming revolved around a “transitional support center” that provided housing and counseling for military vets, all the while serving them drug-laced meals that would erase their traumatic wartime memories so they could be redeployed. Monáe was already a fan of the series. When she read the new scripts, she was quick to say yes. “I could see a lot of great actors playing this [role],” she says of her character, which was written without a particular ethnicity attached. “But I love the fact that I am black and that I get to bring that to the table.”

“No one stands in the fullness of their power quite like Janelle Monáe,” says Michelle Obama. “She is an incandescent talent.”

In season two, which marks her first outing as a TV lead, Monáe plays Jackie, a vet who wakes up in a canoe in the middle of a lake with no idea whatsoever of where, or even who, she is. Retracing her steps—and crossing paths with shrewd Audrey (played by the brilliant Hong Chau)—she begins to decipher the truth. To prepare for the role, Monáe studied thrillers about memory loss like Memento and The Bourne Identity, as well as the dramatic turns of one of her favorite actors, Kerry Washington, whose nuance she finds aspirational.

It turns out that Monáe is an assured action star, gripping and magnetic. Once you round the corner on one of the new Homecoming season’s biggest twists, you’ll see her performance in a different light and rush back to the first episode for a rewatch. “I was really impressed with how nimble her performance is,” says Roberts. “This kind of show is not for the faint of heart, and the workload is Herculean. I know that firsthand.”

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Playing Jackie also gave Monáe, who identifies as pansexual, her first opportunity to play a queer character. Monáe declines to get specific about her own love life, which is rumored to have included famous and talented women, such as Tessa Thompson, whom Monáe cast to play her lover in the accompanying film (or “emotion picture,” in Wondaland parlance) for her last album, Dirty Computer. When I ask how she’s handling romance at the moment, she just laughs and says she can’t wait until she can get a COVID test—until everyone can get a test and go forth and romance each other in good health: “I don’t want to disclose the people I’m dating, or have dated. I may not always want this to be at the center of a conversation.” Monáe knows the power of representation, however, and was thrilled to play Jackie. “I feel a deeper responsibility because I know there are kids like me who could have come from conservative backgrounds,” she says.

Monáe’s social conscience led her to sign on for Antebellum, too. She stars as Veronica Henley, a polished present-day author who, after speaking out about systemic racism, suddenly finds herself living as a slave on a plantation. Monáe was drawn to the movie because she’s a fan of Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained—one of her musical alter egos is the unapologetic “Django Jane”—and Antebellum wound up being shot at Louisiana’s Evergreen Plantation, where parts of that movie were filmed. Monáe also liked the way Antebellum evoked Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred and the fact that it put a woman at the center of a revenge narrative.

Antebellum is unsparing in its violence, as well as in its view of race relations and the way they’ve evolved (or not) over the centuries. The movie may divide viewers, but Monáe is transfixing. She channels Veronica’s pain with true grit. “She really went inward,” says Gerard Bush, who wrote and directed the movie with Christopher Renz. “It was an incredibly difficult experience for her. These plantations—where people are getting married—these are places that should be considered hallowed ground. It should be Auschwitz. You should walk this ground with that kind of respect for the suffering that took place on that land. She was committed to honoring the ancestors.”

Monáe weighed the challenges of the part seriously before accepting it. “I knew that taking on this role was going to take a lot of deep diving emotionally,” she says. “This role is the hardest role that I’ve done, because it directly connects the past, present, and the future. I went back and forth with, Should I do this? People are gonna think I’m crazy. It wasn’t until I did some deep meditation—and I saw so many women that reminded me of Veronica, from Maxine Waters to AOC to all of the strong women in our government—that I said, Yes, I should do this. This scares me, and the conversations need to be had because our past will directly determine our future.”

As for her own future, Monáe wants to act even more, eager to get on another set as soon as it’s safe. For now, she’s in problem-solving mode, figuring out how to support her family from a distance, including her stepdad, a longtime employee of the U.S. Postal Service, a government entity in desperate need that the Trump administration has thus far refused to bail out. Monáe also has a collaborative team she needs to look after. That will be harder now that some of her biggest gigs, like this year’s Essence Festival and NYC Pride, have been canceled.

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PIANO WOMAN
Monáe has been practicing while sheltering in place.Photographs by Collier Schorr.

“I’ve been trying to help the band and the crew as much as I can,” she says. “I’ve been trying. I’ll have to figure out different ways to financially support myself. There was a moment where I did break down and cry. Not just for myself, but for everybody this is affecting—everybody who’s going to lose somebody.”

“There can be a real uprising. The majority of us do not want to continue to see things be the way that they are.”

Dismayed by the government’s paltry $1,200 stimulus checks, Monáe has launched a slew of philanthropic efforts through the Wondaland Arts Society, in Atlanta. She’s partnered with Verizon to donate money to black- and LGBTQ+-owned local businesses. And, since 2018, she’s served as a cochair of When We All Vote, a voting registration nonprofit started by Michelle Obama. “I’ve been doing a lot of organizing, because we are not all in the same boat,” she says. “Staying at home for me is different than staying at home and not working for a mom with five kids, when she’s single and can’t afford to pay her rent or pay for food for her kids.”

Monáe is tireless when it comes to talking politics. She can—and frequently does—bring every topic back around to governance, to capitalism, to corporate greed, to giving the power back to the people. Her polymathic approach to art extends beyond recording studios and film sets. It’s in her philanthropy, in her activism, in everything she does.

“As an activist, she uses her platform to lift up countless communities,” says Obama. “I’ve seen her inspire young people across this country to step into their own power and make their voices heard at the ballot box.”

Because I can’t meet Monáe in person, I ask her friends to tell me how they first met her. Their stories illustrate two of the best ways you could ever meet anyone and capture Monáe in different modes.

Erykah Badu met Monáe after she invited the singer to tour with her in 2010. “The first place I took [Janelle and her crew] was Sedona, Arizona, so that we could visit a vortex,” she says. The Sedona Vortexes—which, until now, I did not know existed—are “swirling centers of energy that are conducive to healing, meditation, and self-exploration,” per the town’s tourism board. Real cosmic shit. “Nobody smoked or drank,” says Badu. “We were just all really sober-minded and clear and pure. Everybody puts their guards down because you feel so balanced.” She and Monáe bonded fast: “We’re mirror reflections of one another when it comes to the way we create. That’s my twin.”

Photographs by Collier Schorr.

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Billy Porter met Monáe under much more glamorous circumstances, when she asked him to perform with her at the Oscars earlier this year. In retrospect, the Emmy- and Tony-winning Porter was a perfect duet partner, but he says Monáe had to fight for him. “There were different suggestions and she said, ‘I’ll only do it if I can have Billy,’ ” he recalls. “She lobbied for me.” Later, they celebrated over cocktails at Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s Oscar party.

A group outing to a vortex. A packed soirée. They’re relics from before civilization was turned upside down.

During isolation, Monáe has been thinking about her devotion to privacy and why she finds it so difficult to talk about the people she’s fallen in love with or even the very room she’s sitting in for this conversation. Her mind has been turning up old traumas, particularly her relationship with her father. They’re close now, she says, but when she was growing up her dad was battling a crack addiction and served time in prison. “I’m happy that he is recovered, but what that left me with growing up was having abandonment issues, because I just never knew when he would show up. I have high anxiety. I’ve always had it.”

She remembers when she and her friends would throw parties in eighth or ninth grade and charge people two dollars to get in. Before the parties, Monáe locked herself in the bathroom. “I was just like, They’re not gonna show up. Nobody’s gonna come.” That feeling seeped into her career and affected how much she reveals about her private life. “If I really talked openly and honestly about where I am right now, would I be abandoned? Would my fans abandon me? Would my family abandon me?” She’s been trying to unpack those feelings and memories by keeping a journal and writing music “centered around what it means to deal with your trauma. How does that sound? How does that feel? What are the colors there?”

I talk to Monáe a second time a few days after our Zoom chat. She’s wrapped the photo shoot for this issue and mentions that she kept the braids for the pictures. “I loved it because it was just a reflection of where I am now,” she says. The worst of her mercury poisoning symptoms—the fatigue, the hair loss, the breakouts—are behind her, fortunately.

Monáe has spent some time driving around lately, observing people in masks, taking in the state of our world. She’s also been reflecting on something her friend Mellody Hobson, the investment executive and former DreamWorks Animation chairwoman, told her. (Monáe performed at Hobson’s 2013 wedding to George Lucas.) What Hobson said, in essence, was this: We got through the Spanish flu, and we’ll get through this. There will be a vaccine—and a future.

“There can be a real uprising,” Monáe says of society post-pandemic. “The majority of us do not want to continue to see things be the way that they are. We’re demanding better health care for ourselves, demanding people listen to scientists as it pertains to the environment, as it pertains to our health.”

Still, at this point in her self-isolation journey, Monáe is ready to have just a few simple pleasures back. She wants to hug her mom. She wants to hug her sister and her infant niece. She wants to travel to South Africa. She wants to really live again, and more. Above all, she wants to be in a room full of people, music pulsing as they stand too close and move too much.

“I’m ready to go to a party,” she says insistently. “A party where we are sweating, we are smiling, we are dancing for our souls.”